Lake Meadows residents criticize redevelopment plan

(Crain's) -- Facing a testy crowd of 150 people or more, Draper & Kramer Inc. on Tuesday night presented its plan to build more than 7,800 residential units and a half-million square feet of retail space at the Lake Meadows apartment complex on Chicago's southern lakefront.

(Crain's) -- Facing a testy crowd of 150 people or more, Draper & Kramer Inc. on Tuesday night presented its plan to build more than 7,800 residential units and a half-million square feet of retail space at the Lake Meadows apartment complex on Chicago's southern lakefront.

Rendering by Chicago Consultants Studio of what the completed project would look like. The proposed project, among the biggest real estate developments ever in the city, would take at least two decades to complete, Draper & Kramer representatives told a standing-room only crowd at a South Side church. To make way for the project, the Chicago developer wants to demolish all of the roughly 1,870 apartments on the 70-acre property along Martin Luther King Drive between 31st and 35th streets.

"We feel that we have a tremendous opportunity here to recreate a neighborhood," said Draper & Kramer President and CEO Forrest Bailey, whose grandfather, Ferdinand Kramer, led the development of Lake Meadows in the 1950s.

But several people in the audience of Lake Meadows residents harshly criticized the plan, and Draper & Kramer representatives had trouble at times controlling the unruly crowd. The primary concern: that longtime renters would be kicked out of their units and face unaffordable rents at new apartments in the project.

One speaker characterized the proposal as "a gentrification plan." A person in the back row shouted that it constituted "ethnic cleansing."

Draper & Kramer executives stressed that the residents would receive plenty of notice before being forced to relocate and would be given first dibs on new apartments. The development would also include an ample supply of affordable and senior housing, they said.

"We would like nothing better than for all of the existing residents to stay in the community," said Draper & Kramer Vice-president Don Vitek.

Though Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympics, which would be concentrated on the South Side, has spurred interest in the area among developers, Mr. Bailey said the games are not the impetus for the project, which was in the works well before Olympic talk heated up.

"The existing buildings have reached a point of physical and functional obsolescence," he said.

The developer plans to build about 2,000 apartments and 5,845 for-sale homes, including townhomes and condos. The firm won't provide a cost estimate for the project, which would begin in three to five years, but the total investment likely would stretch into the billions of dollars.

The Tuesday-night meeting was the second of several with neighborhood residents as Draper & Kramer tries to build community support for the redevelopment. Alderman Toni Preckwinkle (4th), whose ward includes Lake Meadows and who was at the meeting, said she favors the plan generally but still needs to work out many details with the developer. The Chicago Department of Planning and Development and City Council must sign off on the project, too.

The development would include a mix of high- and low-rise buildings, with four signature skyscrapers overlooking Lake Shore Drive on the eastern edge of the property. Though new buildings would eat up a lot of green space, Draper & Kramer would build a bridge connecting the site to a 15-acre park sandwiched between Metra tracks and Lake Shore Drive.

The firm wants to reconnect Lake Meadows to the surrounding neighborhood by tearing down fences around the property's perimeter and extending city streets through the site.

"In many ways, we're like a surgeon restitching the neighborhood back together," said Kimbal Goluska, a consultant on the project.

Draper & Kramer expects to begin on the south end of the site, where it would demolish the 196,000-square-foot Lake Meadows Shopping Center and replace it with a so-called town center retail development, which would have street-level stores under two or three stories of apartments or condos.

Nancy Wright, who has been living at Lake Meadows for two years, said she worries that she won't be able to afford to rent or buy a home in the new development. But she thinks the plan makes sense.

"The buildings are old," she said after the meeting. The property "just needs to be updated with the times."